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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.4 (2004) 672-674



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Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia, and Grief in Post-war Australia. By Joy Damousi (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 240pp. $60.00

As a history of memory, and an analysis of trauma, Damousi's Living with the Aftermath situates itself at the intersection of two important topics in contemporary historical scholarship. Memory studies, influenced by the pioneering work of Nora, have brought fresh attention to the ways in which the past is digested and narrated through structures of remembrance, be they private or public, personal or collective.1 At the same time, scholars such as Caruth have re-vitalized the study of trauma, examining how persons and nations respond to the radical discontinuities occasioned by profoundly disruptive events.2

Damousi's book offers a contribution to both burgeoning fields of scholarship. Her focus is on Australian war widows, and her methodology [End Page 672] depends on oral history. The book is based largely on an analysis of seventy interviews that the author conducted with Australian women widowed by their nation's principal military engagements of the latter half of the twentieth century—World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In studying the personal narratives of war widows, Damousi's achievements are twofold: First, she makes a solid contribution to the study of "secondary traumatization." The vast majority of studies of trauma focus on the effects of radically disruptive events on those who experience them directly. By focusing on the experience of women who lost their husbands either on the battlefield or to the lingering effects of war wounds, Damousi's book sheds important light on how traumatic injuries—physical and psychic—leave an indelible scar upon those besides their primary victims.

As a second matter, Damousi's book offers an interesting history of the changing culture of remembrance within Australian society. In an earlier day, particularly in the wake of the two world wars, widowhood was a condition to be stoically endured. Rituals of public commemoration paid tribute to the valor of the fallen, not to the quiet perseverance of the widows. More recently, however, Australian society has become more accepting of open displays of grieving, more tolerant of the public sharing of pain, and more attentive to the voice of trauma.

Damousi's contribution is solid in these respects, but the book is disappointing in others. Part of the problem is her writing, which is often flat, and at times needlessly ponderous. Sentences such as the following abound: "In conflating their own sense of neglect with that of their husbands, widows carried a lack of recognition for both husband and wife" (193). At times, the insights are banal to the point of truism: "Robertson's journey suggests what others have pointed to, that identities are shaped through memories and experience" (112). At others, broad conclusions are drawn from material that does not support such generous inferences. Commenting on the experience of a woman whose husband turned abusive as a result of war trauma, Damousi writes, "Ford's experience of volatility, violence and tensions challenges several prevailing assumptions about family life in the 1950s and 1960s as stable, harmonious and tranquil" (130)—as if this isolated experience sufficed to challenge a prevailing social myth.

This latter problem points to a deeper insufficiency in Damousi's book. Although she cites the standard works about trauma and memory, she fails to demonstrate an adequate mastery of the key theoretical terms of her study. In discussing how one war widow glorified her husband after his death in battle, Damousi comments, "idealization becomes a way of resisting trauma" (83), a curious observation, inasmuch as most scholars would find such idealization a telling symptom of trauma's presence, not an indication of its successful repression. Later, in describing the rituals surrounding Australia's official day commemorating the nation's sacrifices in World War I, Damousi writes, "It is ironic that a two minute period of silence was introduced for Anzac Day as a collective form [End...

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